Marc Berman has been writing professionally since 1999 and is the author of the “Mr. Television” for Campaign US (www.campaignlive.com). Most recently, Berman was the creator and Editor-in-Chief of website and newsletter TV Media Insights for Cross MediaWorks. From 1999-2011, he was the Senior Editor for Mediaweek and has also written for The New York Daily News, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Emmy Magazine, among others. Berman has also appeared on “Entertainment Tonight,” “Extra,” “Access Hollywood,” “Inside Edition,” “The CBS Evening News,” E!, CNN, CNBC, Fox News and MSNBC.

14 Comments

I would not be surprised if DWTS beats The Voice for the first time in their head-to-head finales tonight. Last night The Voice was down 23% from last season. It also lost in *gasp* 18-34’s to DWTS by .02. Who said DWTS is too old? Yes The Voice will see a ratings increase in the fall with Miley… but let’s face it – the concept is stale, and viewers are losing interest in rooting for finalists that have no resonance in the music industry right now. It has truly become a gimmick, and a musical-chairs (no pun intended) of celebrity judges which is probably the only reason why it’s still (relatively) popular.

I do believe DWTS beats The Voice tonight and starts beating it on a regular basis after the Miley hype dies down next season. Other NBC shows will start passing up The Voice as well as the Chicago shows were real close to doing it. That’s the overall problem with The Voice though it focuses way too much on the blind audition gimmicks and judges. There’s never any attention really thrown on the contestants. I always believed if Jordan Smith who is doing well out of that show right now and Cassadee Pope were on a show where they focused on the talent like Idol they would be even bigger stars in the mainstream. If the show’s ratings continue to slide they may need to switch their focus of the show to focus on the contestants a lot more.

Well Tribune and the CW renewed their affiliate agreement for five years with the lone exception being WGN in Chicago which will air more sports along with more local programming and syndicated shows. The current MyNetwork affiliate, WPWR, will be the CW affiliate September 1. There hasn’t been any word what if any station will become the MyNetwork affiliate in Chicago. MyNetwork just airs a syndicated block so if Chicago doesn’t have an affiliate, there’s no big loss.

Yeah I heard about this yesterday and it doesn’t surprise me but what was interesting is that in the Chicagoland area they’re switching to WPWR which is a much smaller broadcasting network than WGN was which reaches 100% of the viewers while WPWR only reaches 91.2% this is why The WB used to kick UPN’s asses on a regular basis on most nights of the week except like Thursdays when SmackDown used to come on. So they’re losing a ton of viewers here since that’s a major market so I expect year-to-year declines not only locally in Chicago but nationally too but it won’t be too big since the other Tribune stations reupped.

WGN is known for preempting CW’s coverage for sports so this is a huge win for them because WGN can make more money by airing more of their local teams like the Cubs, Blackhawks, Bulls, and White Sox. The Blackhawks can air on a weeknight now in primetime too. So this worked out for them as I think their syndicated and sports programming will serve as a much better lead-in than CW programming did.

For CW fans in Chicago who do have access to WPWR which is most of their viewers in Chicago as the only people who don’t have access to WPWR are the obscure town in the Chicagoland market or where there’s no transmitter licenses at. So I’m assuming if you live in the city of Cook County or the surrounding suburbs you have the network. Those fans used to deal with preemptions like I just mentioned before so now they’ll be able to watch their shows uninterrupted as I assume WGN will take all of the sports coverage in primetime.

Jim you brought up a great question about MyNetworkTV because that was never addressed and I don’t see WGN picking that network up so it probably goes to one of the other broadcasting tiers on a smaller broadcasting channel. It’s not a huge loss at all as this is a huge gain for WPWR because they get more popular programming and MyNetworkTV was like ION just airing a bunch of rerun garbage.

Even though I get both WPWR and WGN through Comcast, WPWR always looks fuzzier to me for some reason. WCIU is the only independent station left, but since they air syndicated programs as well as some sports, it doesn’t seem likely they would need the MyNetwork affiliation.

I’ve heard that from people that WPWR’s channel is fuzzier even the HD channel so the CW shows might not look as clear on there as they did on WGN who has a better signal. I thought about WCIU too but they too stopped airing sports in primetime on that network in favor of their own syndicated comedies and they made a deal with ABC-7 some years ago to air their news program in the first hour of primetime so I definitely don’t see them taking MyNetworkTV. Another option might be the sister network WCIU 2 who might have room for it.

You’re right about WCIU. One thing that could happen is that WPWR is an affiliate to both CW and MyNetwork. The CW would air 7-9 and MN 9-11. A couple of other MyNetwork affiliates had dual affiliates for a while.

Man I hadn’t thought of that, now that would be interesting and could totally work for WPWR because FOX owns MyNetworkTV and would probably prefer the network stay on WPWR since I know WFLD (FOX) won’t program it in their late night hours over syndicated programming. Since they program reruns anyways it won’t matter if they ran during 9-11pm which is different from 10pm-12am out on the East Coast. 9pm is the last hour of primetime in Chicago so it could easily work.

One thing I’ve always known in the past is that the affiliates would much rather have the networks provide programming than buying programming. So WPWR can kill 4 hours right there and the syndication market is starting to get slimmer these days due to a lack of new hit comedies in the broadcasting market.

I do remember some markets having MyNetworkTV having dual affiliates and that could totally work in Chicago and could even help MyNetworkTV in the long run by grabbing some of those CW viewers to maybe get back in the original programming game one day.

Thank goodness CW didn’t leave WPIX in NYC. The other alternative was it would probably move to WLNY in Long Island which is owned by CBS. I enjoy that channel as the WCBS alternative whenever NFL football preempts the schedule, especially during Big Brother season.

Wow DWTS is looking pretty good going into the finale tonight while The Voice is limping into the Finals. They better that Olympic promotion and the additions of Miley Cyrus and Alicia Key can get these ratings way back up because they’re no longer really a great lead-in for shows. One thing I’ve always stated for DWTS is that their audience is older but they bigger viewership to still serve as a decent lead-in, The Voice audience is getting smaller and smaller every year, it might die out faster than Idol did.